Experimental / avant-garde filmmaking became a fertile, serious art movement in the United States with the creation of MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON by the husband and wife team of Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren in 1943.  Experimental shorts had been made before MESHES, however this black-and-white film of dark Freudian imagery, filmed in bright Los [...]

Documentary Film experienced a sea-change during the 10-year period from 1980 to 1990.  As video cameras entered the mass-retail market, many who felt they had something to say quickly embraced video as the medium for getting their message to a large audience.  The result was an exponential number of offerings, voices never allowed cultural space [...]

Over the years, I’ve often wondered what the story was behind the Rochester-based creative team of Watson and Webber, who made experimental, avant-garde films in the 1920s and 30s.  James Sibley Watson was an M.D. with connections to early 20th Century modern poets such as E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore.  The less-documented Melville Webber, [...]

Los Angeles in the days of New Wave totally kicked ass:   The Police (including an impossibly young Sting) gigging at the upstairs bar of Madame Wong’s in Chinatown; Pee-Wee Herman developing his act at clubs on Sunset Boulevard; Andy Warhol snapping Polaroids of hipsters waiting on the street to get into Club Lingerie; future [...]

[This post was written in conjunction with the For the Love of Film:  The Film Preservation Blogathon this week.  Please DONATE to the National Film Preservation Foundation.] The need for film preservation eventually reduces to a discussion of film stock.  It’s the effects of age and the unstable chemicals in the physical elements of film [...]

On December 30th, 2009, the Library of Congress announced the next twenty-five films chosen for preservation in the National Film Registry, merited on their “enduring importance to American culture.”  On the list was the 1975 animated short QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO by Sally Cruikshank. As the Library of Congress announced: “Quasi at the Quackadero” has [...]

When Francis Coppola’s RUMBLE FISH was released in the early 1980s, I read a report that throughout the production the director would repeat, “This is my student film.” I’m a former film student and ex-professor to film students, so I understand how that phrase crystallizes a unique aesthetic and precious experience in film viewing:  the [...]

Association of Moving Image Archivists St. Louis November, 2009 FIRST BLOG POST FROM AMIA CONFERENCE St. Louis gave the world ice cream cones and Agnes Moorehead, Nelly and T. S. Elliot, Masters & Johnson and peanut butter.  But this week, the world is giving something righteously awesome back to this cool city as the Association [...]

I was making myself comfortable at a friend’s house, channel surfing while he was getting ready to go out, when I came across the opening credits for a 1968 British film, DUFFY.  The credits were trippy-kaleidescopic, the kind that 2006′s CASINO ROYALE wittily riffed on, so I kept watching.  When the credits were near the [...]